766 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONdomination of the government by the yangban civilian officials over the mili-
tary was continued without change. But there was no attempt to expand the edu-
cation and training of civilian officials to broaden their outlook and increase their
appreciation of military affairs.
Little was done to lengthen the terms of service for officials. In fact, the trend
seems to have been in the opposite direction because officials were shifted so
frequently that there was little expectation that they could gain control over their
staff officials and clerks. The clerks were never granted salaries by the state, and
their corruption continued to be one of the major sources of popular discontent.
Community compacts were never established and no institution was created to
replace the local clerk between the people and the magistrate. The failure to solve
this problem made the magistrates and their clerks the cause of oppression both
in the collection of taxes and service and the administration of credit and relief
that led to massive peasant rebellions in 18 I 2 and 1862.
Although nothoi were eventually allowed to take the examinations, the social
stigma against them still remained strong. After 1800 slaves apparently were
able to escape registration as slaves and presumably all the deficiencies con-
current therewith, but what should have been a monumental improvement in
social condition did not prevent a devolution toward serious rural discontent and
popular rebellion.
When the Taewongun, the father of the minor King Kojong, seized power from
1864 to 1873, however, he made some attempts to institute reforms suggested
by Yu and others. In other words, only when the dynasty was facing imminent
collapse from the threat of foreign invasion and internal subversion did a leader
appear with enough motivation and conviction to attempt some of the reforms
that were required. The most important structural reforms, however, included
an assertion of royal power, not its subordination to the prime minister or state
council. The Taewongun did replace the Border Defense Command with the State
Council, but the action did not signify the exercise of bureaucratic responsibil-
ity against royal authority.
The Taewongun did adopt the idea of special recommendation of officials for
bureaucratic appointments to supplement the work of the Ministry of Person-
nel, but the result of this effort was to appoint men with connections to high
officials, who already represented dominant bureaucratic factions and some of
the consort relatives, like the Andong Kim and P'ungyang Cho - not the moral
elite of society that Yu Hyongwon had in mind. He never attempted to elimi-
nate the examination system and replace it with a system of official schools
throughout the entire country as the major means of education and recruitment,
but the Taewongun's did abolish most of the private academies because they
had come to serve only their own private political and economic interests rather
than the public good. In personnel policy his main goal was to overcome the
domination of the bureaucracy by consort relatives and the members of the Patri-
arch's and Disciples' Factions, a problem that Yu had virtually ignored in his